


Go Gentle

by IncurableNecromantic



Category: Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)
Genre: Ghosts, Hallucinations, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, What Dreams May Come homage, featuring the triumphant return of Ibil the Camel!, institutionalization (or threats thereof), mentions of lobotomies, symbolically significant rose trellises, the downside of Atlantean crystal pendants is herein described, the sin of philosophers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-17
Updated: 2015-01-17
Packaged: 2018-03-07 23:59:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,167
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3188123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IncurableNecromantic/pseuds/IncurableNecromantic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Preston B. Whitmore has been struck of all Thatches for the last thirty-five years.</p><p>And then one night in the January of 1950 starts it all up again. </p><p>  <i>Some of this story relies upon the events of<a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/1657985/chapters/3517463"> Damn Fool Expeditions</a> to make sense.  If you're in this niche fandom for this niche pairing already, you might as well truck on over for more of the same.</i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Go Gentle

In the winter of 1950 Preston B. Whitmore began his one hundred sixth year of life with a bang. One wine cork burst from the mouth of the bottle and disappeared into the darkened distance of his browned and withered pleasure grounds. The other he neatly caught in a towel, as it was a sin to waste bubbles.

It was an impossibly warm January in the District of Columbia that year, and Preston recognized the prevailing vernal pleasures meted out to him by generous Mother Nature by pouring the first bottle of Dom Perignon over the side of his balcony as a libation to the fates while the other’s contents were poured directly down his throat. Half the bottle down, he smothered a discreet belch and considered, not for the first time, the pistol in his office desk drawer.

This really couldn’t go on, even if this wasn’t the way he wanted it to end.

He raised his fingers to brush at the moustache that clung like a series of little icicles from the cliff of his upper lip. His hair wasn’t giving up the ghost as badly as he’d feared it might, but old age wasn’t pretty, no matter how artificially preserved and elongated. He felt strange. He looked good, looked seventy, but he knew he was older than he ever should have been.

One depression, two world wars, three stooges, four British monarchs, five generations of children, and twenty-two presidents under his belt, and here he was despite it all, rich and old and quite alone.

“Well, Thatch,” he said, striding into the study on his Sphinxian three legs, “here we are. The year of our Lord nineteen hundred and fifty, Gawd help us all.”

He addressed himself to the portrait above the fireplace. It had been painted forty years ago now. To think that Milo Thatch had last seen it when it was a tenth that old made something quake dismally in Preston’s bones.

About his neck he wore a present from beyond, the crystal pendant sent back to him by the boy. Though of course the “boy” must be, oh dear, nigh on sixty years old, now. Ten years off from Preston’s age when he sent Milo on that expedition.

He probably looked just like Thad.

“By the by, Thaddeus,” Preston said, striding up to the fireplace. “I want to lodge a formal inquiry, and you are the man to carry it out.”

Thaddeus looked down at him with mild eyes.

“I want to know on what grounds my numerous petitions to join the choir eternal have been so summarily rejected,” Preston said, prodding the fire with his cane. Despite the unseasonable warmth he found it was better to have a fire in the house, if only for the light. His beloved fishtanks cast an eerie blue light over all that made him half-feel himself already beneath the ground.

“I’m sure I cling to precious life as tenaciously as any man, Thatch,” Preston went on, poking and prodding, “but isn’t this pushing it a bit? Doesn’t this seem just a little unnecessary, even for the most extraordinary of coves?”

The logs crackled and he set his weight back on his stick, looking up.

“Am I not a qualified candidate?” he asked the portrait. “Notwithstanding my fingers in the pudding of the prosperity gospels, have I completely failed to live a good life? I’ve been working on my flexibility. If anybody’s going to wriggle through the eye of the celestial needle, it might yet be me.”

He paced to and fro for a moment or two before plonking himself into an armchair.

“These thirty five years I’ve been struck of Thatches of all kinds,” he said, giving the portrait a little of the old hairy eyeball. “I have survived you all, no matter how many times you and your spawn tried to wring my heart out. I saw you into the ground and minded your grandson after the fact, and I daresay I’ve earned myself a little rest, wouldn’t you say?”

The portrait, as the portrait always had, declined to reply.

“I mean, land sakes,” Preston sighed. “I’m a Whitmore. I’ve stuck it out. I can’t have lived all this long to become a suicide now.”

“No,” said the portrait.

Preston looked at the portrait very, very carefully.

Thaddeus, rendered in oils and canvas, glared down at him from beside his unmoving doppelganger. “No, Preston, if you even think about it, I’ll thump you so hard I’ll leave a dent in that bald skull of yours.”

Preston nodded thoughtfully and steepled his fingers. “What are they putting in Dom Perignon these days, I wonder?”

Thaddeus unwrapped his arms around Preston’s painted counterpart and left him looking rather silly, with his hands hovering in mid-air. “I’m not a hallucination.”

“In a pig’s eye, you’re not,” Preston snapped. “I don’t know if the severity of the situation has impressed itself upon your consciousness, sir, but you happen to be in a painting.”

“Oh, am I?” Thaddeus asked, reaching towards the edge of the canvas and seeming to give it a little push. “Funny thing, I hadn’t thought so. Natty work, if I might say so. Can’t hardly see the brush strokes.”

“That’s because you need glasses, you old fool,” Preston replied. “In any event, bed back down into my subconscious, if you’ll be so good. I’ll not be tormented by you on this, my birthday.”

“Bon anniversaire, Pres. Must be past one hundred by now.”

“Considerably. Begone, vision.”

Thaddeus gave him a smile, arranged his arms into their right position, and melted back into stiff two-dimensionality.

Preston nodded. He had control of his own psychotic breaks, thank you so very much. No one made Preston B. Whitmore feel insane but Preston B. Whitmore.

He was going to bed.

***

The next day he managed to work until two thirty in the afternoon, when exhaustion finally overwhelmed him and he had to take a little nap on the sofa.

Even with his eyelids shut, he could tell he’d slept until dark.

“This is a charming pendant,” said Thaddeus. Something cold brushed against Preston’s chest. “It suits you.”

Preston opened his eyes and glared at the Thatchian figment of his imagination currently kneeling beside his sofa. Irritatingly enough, this Thaddeus, though faintly transparent, was a strapping twenty-something, blonde and bright-eyed as an incubus.

Preston gave himself a very firm pinch and was a little annoyed when he didn’t wake up.

“I’m not about to let you do this to me,” he told Thaddeus firmly. “You will not go all Dickensian on me, Thaddeus, I vow it will not go.”

“Will it not?”

“No. I like Christmas perfectly well despite having no particular reason to enjoy the season and I have no need to be made jolly at the insistence of pushy spectres. And in any event I don’t believe you’re really a spectre.”

“Why not? Do I not look the part? I’m happy to go throw on a sheet or douse myself in red paint, if you think it would help.”

“You are already the most vengeful and unwanted undigested crumb of cheese that has ever risen up to fight for its fallen brethren, and that quite without traipsing through my home, dribbling red paint all over the furnishings,” Preston replied. “I cannot suggest you push your luck.”

Thaddeus smiled at him and reached for the pendant. He took it up in his fingers and examined it, eyes gleaming behind his spectral spectacles. “My God. It’s so warm. I never thought I’d see one on Earth.”

“Did I not just caution you about pushing your luck?” Preston asked, swatting at Thaddeus’ hands. There, see? Hallucination. He couldn’t reach out and grasp him.

“Oh, balderdash, Preston, as if you’ll bung me out on the curb. You can’t even lay hands upon me.”

Preston grumbed and reached for his stick. Thaddeus caught it up and passed it to him. He snatched it away, using it to lever himself up into a sitting position and taking a moment to pant, hard.

Thaddeus kneeled on the floor and watched him. “You’re very old,” was his keen observation, expressed in a small voice.

“You know, Thatch, it’s insight like that that made you a giant among your contemporaries,” Preston said. “I’m going to take back some of the things I said about you.”

“No, I mean--” Thaddeus heaved a sigh. “You look exactly like you did the last time I saw you. On the outside, I mean. On the inside, though, you look...tired.”

Preston heaved a sigh. “Of course I’m tired, you idiot. You’ve been dead for forty years and you weren’t young yourself.”

“Forty years,” Thaddeus echoed, wincing. “God bless me, it didn’t feel so long.”

“Liar,” Preston snapped, pushing himself up and pacing to the sideboard. “You’re me. I’ve felt every second of it. No wonder I look old, you imbecile, I’ve been dying by degrees for the last thirty five years.”

He poured a pair of brandies on pure reflex and held them in one hand as he hobbled back over to his armchair. He set Thatch’s on the end table and drained his own dram quickly, waving to the other glass to offer it to Thaddeus.

Preston set his own cup on the end table with a sigh.

“Pres,” Thaddeus said sadly. He reached out and sank his fingers through the liquor and the glass.

Hallucination.

Preston picked the glass up and contemplated hurling it into the fireplace. A little too melodramatic, under the circumstances.

“Go away,” he said to Thaddeus, and drained the second glass dry.

***

Thaddeus appeared at the other end of the dinner table. Thaddeus appeared in his office, sitting on his desk and swinging his feet as he read out of Preston’s ledger book. Thaddeus appeared in the water closet and leaned against the sink bank, talking to him while he had a bath.

Thaddeus visited him at night in the study, when he had a fireplace going. Thaddeus grinned at the picture of the two of them parting in revulsion from their kiss. Thaddeus touched all his artefacts and fondled his elephant tusks in a somewhat perplexing fashion.

With calm and stern self-restraint Preston banished the hallucination every night, but it was beginning to take hours and hours to get the point where it was a desirable course of action.

He would not go to a doctor for an anti-psychotic. He was rich and he was safe and he sure as shit hadn’t lived this long just to die in an asylum.

One night he woke up at the ringing of the three o’clock bell, sprawled out on the sofa. Thaddeus had wedged himself against the arm of the chair and his hallucination charitably offered him the cool sensation of spectral fingers running through his hair.

“You fell asleep,” Thaddeus explained. “Right in the middle of your description of Fenton Harcourt’s funeral.”

Good Lord, more than twenty years back, now.

“In a word, I found it underwhelming,” Preston admitted, sighing and relaxing back against the sofa once more. “But I spat on his grave. Hope you approve.”

Thaddeus laughed quietly. “Always so concerned for my reputation, Pres. I’m touched.”

“I believe now as I believed then,” Preston said calmly. “You are and always were a great man. I shouldn’t have to defend it to myself.”

“I was just an explorer,” Thaddeus argued. “Running off half-cocked, blithering on and on, with nothing to support me but you and my desperate willingness to believe. And I did lean on you, didn’t I? Let you finance a world’s worth of travel--”

Preston reached up and stoppered the hallucination’s mouth with his hand.

“It was my money to give, and it was always at your disposal,” he said. “I was always so happy to be able to be of use to you that way. You leaned on me because I asked you to.”

“You were too good to me.”

“Oh, no. For my sins, I tried to be the best I could,” Preston replied. “What little I could do for you.”

Thaddeus stroked his hair for some quiet moments. Preston had almost fallen asleep once more when Thaddeus’ voice asked, “What sins, Preston? You were ever a good, kind-hearted, decent man.”

Preston clenched his jaw. “Nevermind. I think you’d better leave, now.”

Thaddeus cupped his hands around Preston’s cheeks and looked down at him, eyes full of fire. “What sins, Preston?”

Preston stared, wide-eyed and shaken. Maybe he wasn’t far off from his earlier incubus suspicion.

“Leave, now,” he commanded through gritted teeth, staring up at Thaddeus.

“Please don’t send me away,” Thad said.

“Now!” Preston barked, and the sad face of Thaddeus Thatch hovered before his gaze for a moment before it melted away into the still shadows of his study.

***

For many days, Thaddeus was gone. Preston was too old to want to continue lying to himself, and once the initial panicky anger had worn off, he didn’t even bother pretending he didn’t miss his hallucination. After all, just because he wasn’t going to die in an institution didn’t mean he wasn’t insane.

A week went by and Preston spent most nights in the firelit study, staring up at the fireplace portrait in the all-pervading silence of the darkened house. His servants, what few he kept these days, either never saw their master sitting in this mad attitude or never made mention of it. The first few nights he didn’t drink at all, but most evenings afterwards he slowly nursed a bottle of wine.

One night, after a few hours of staring, he finally realized that the painted Thatch was looking back at him.

He smiled. Thatch smiled back.

“Apologies for my earlier outburst,” he said, relaxing back into the chair.

“Not at all,” Thaddeus said. “It was rude of me to push you.” He leaned out of the painting and looked around a little. “Are we alone?”

“As far as I can tell,” Preston said, taking a sip from his glass. “Join me, won’t you?”

“Don’t mind if I do.” Thaddeus wrapped both hands around the frame of the painting and boosted himself out. The years melted away from his painted-age and he wandered about the room a bright, tender twenty-something in an explorer’s suit. “Oh, and I wanted to say that I bumped into Fenty Harcourt the other day.”

“Did you indeed?” Amazing, that his subconscious would bother with old man Harcourt at such a time, when there was young Thaddeus bobbing around the room, but there you had it.

Thaddeus poured himself a drink. “Oh, yes. Poor old fellow. He just about spat when he saw me. He did get fat, lands alive.”

“You’re telling me.”

“We get most everybody up there,” Thaddeus said. “Mary spends most of her time with writers and such. Got a sweet little reproduction of the old Library at Alexandria which is nice, if you can bear to sit quite that long. Milo’s going to love it. But it’s not much for me, you know. I prefer the thrill of the search. Once things are found, I kind of lose interest.”

“I had noticed that about you, yes,” Preston said. Thaddeus leaned against his chair.

“James and Isadora are up there, too,” Thaddeus said gently, swirling the wine in his cup. “It’s, uh...it’s hard, you know? Having outlived them. They’re proud of Milo, which is all I ever hoped for, but I think it’s hard for them. Hideous, to die so young.”

“Yes,” Preston murmured. “God, I still remember your phone call…”

Thaddeus shuddered and drained his glass. “But they’re happy. And they’re grateful to you, Pres, for giving him what he needed. You’re the last grandparent he had, in a way.”

Preston scoffed. “Flapdoodle. Don’t pull that sentimentalist nonsense on me, Thatch. I can certainly be candid with myself, if no one else. I will not suffer to be told such horse-hockey by my own hallucinations.”

“Oh, I’m a hallucination, am I?”

“Unless you really want to try to sell me on your being a ghost,” Preston sneered. “And you’ll pardon me if I laugh for a very, very long while at that idea. If I’m going to be haunted, it’ll be by Warwick. Or is he ‘up there,’ too?”

“He might be. I’ve never looked for him,” Thaddeus said quietly. “But your mother--”

“No.”

“...she loves you,” Thaddeus put in obstinately. “She was so glad that you moved her back to DC, after Warwick went. It helped her rest.”

Preston waved his glass at the phantasm. “Sentimentalist. Nonsense. If you’re going to play ghost, be a lad and fill that up.”

Thaddeus returned both their glasses to the sideboard and filled them, before bringing them back. Preston sipped from his drink. It certainly tasted real. Hell of a hallucination, by Jove. But he never did do anything by half-measures, and he did only accept the best, so perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that his psychotic breaks would be nothing less than exceptional.

“You run into so many different kinds of people, of course,” Thaddeus said, “and I don’t want to name drop--” He coughed in a way that sounded suspiciously like ‘Proclus and Crantor.’ “But I did manage to bump into King Kashekim Nedakh, you know, the one Doc Sweet sent gentle into that good night?”

“Oh, yes, of course.” Good heavens. What _was_ Joshua Sweet getting up to these days? Preston sincerely hoped that all was well on his end. “And do you like him? I rather thought Milo and the Queen were an item.”

“No, no, I don’t believe they are.”

“No?”

“No, I believe they’re friends.” Thaddeus paused and looked at Preston with a wild kind of grin. Laughter barely held at bay, he said, “As far as I can tell it’s all strictly Platonic!”

Preston couldn’t help it. The idiotic pun startled a laugh out of him and he and Thaddeus roared for a few minutes in helpless mirth. When they managed to recover themselves, Preston laid back in his chair, breathing heavily and coughing a little.

“Ah, Thatch,” he sighed, grinning, “I have missed you. All these years...”

Thaddeus perched himself on the arm of the chair and gave him a singularly sweet smile. “I’ve missed you too, Pres. Even before I died, I missed you.”

Preston scoffed and shook his head.

“No, listen to me,” Thaddeus said, reaching out and taking Preston’s shoulder. “I missed you, Preston. We had some great adventures, you and I, but we wasted so much time. I know that now. If being dead gives you anything, it’s a dose of perspective. We were both cowards, and the worst part is that we never even needed to be so afraid.”

Preston stared at his hallucination. “I’m afraid I’ve lost me,” he said after a moment.

“Pres. Come now. ‘I’ll kiss you full on the mouth’? What kind of excuse is that?” Thaddeus asked with a tender smile.

“What are you talking about?” Preston snapped.

“You were being obvious, and I should’ve done something about it.”

“Thatch, you’re being obtuse. Or I’m being obtuse through you. What the hell am I trying to say?”

“Preston, I knew what your limits were and I saw that you were in pain but I didn’t know how to anything about it,” Thaddeus said, the smile disappearing. He leaned close, almost wedged into the armchair with Preston, and held Preston’s face in his hands. “I thought you wouldn’t let me, so I let us both starve. I’ll never forgive myself for it. There’s so much I should’ve told you. So much I should’ve done.”

“Thad--”

“Your sins are not sins, Preston,” Thaddeus said, and he pressed his face against Preston’s. Their lips connected in a chilly brush and Preston stared blindly out of his wide eyes.

He’d never stopped thinking about Thaddeus like this, not when Thaddeus married Mary, not when Preston lost the last of his youthful auburn splendor and sank into his albin old age, not when Thaddeus’ headstone stared up at him from the cold Washington mud. But he’d never permitted it to intrude upon his mind this vividly. And he’d certainly never imagined that Thaddeus would be the one to come to him.

A wonderful psychotic break.

Thaddeus seemed to press closer and the cold pressed more firmly against his lips. Preston reached up and let a hand hover uncertainly for a moment or two, before dropping it and gripping the arm of his chair. He knew he was imagining this, but the physical proof of touching nothing but air would be too much to bear. He closed his eyes and let his mind lie to him as it pleased, and he imagined illusory hands cupped the back of his head and his jaw. Thaddeus kissed him, without tease or revulsion or any hesitancy whatsoever.

At last the hallucination had mercy and the illusion of Thaddeus leaned back to smile at him.

“Oh, you son of a bitch,” Preston sighed. “You can’t talk about Mary and not two moments later kiss me like that.”

Thaddeus grinned wildly. “She always knew, Pres. She always did. I told you that before I married her. And, um. Well. The marital bed was, uh...let’s just say that she was very understanding about me insisting on darkness. James wouldn’t have been made, without your...um, inspiration.”

Good God.

“I am a cad,” Preston said, disgusted at himself. “To think that kind of thing about you and poor Mary, and put it in your mouth…”

“Pres, I’m not a hallucination,” Thaddeus insisted. “I’m haunting you.”

“The hell you are, Thatch. If you are indeed a phantom from beyond the veil of Death’s dark shade, where have you been these thirty five years, pray? If you were haunting me you could’ve picked a better time to do it. I’ve been dithering about for years and they have been lonesome, so what makes this the time you’d condescend to return as the icy spectre of Uranian extramarital canoodling?”

“That was not canoodling, Preston, and I swear by the stars that when you are canoodled, you will know it,” Thaddeus said, bobbling his eyebrows. “And I don’t think it was extramarital. Death did part us, after all…”

“Thatch!”

“Yes?”

“Why now?” Preston insisted.

Thaddeus sighed and smiled at him. A cold presence brushed along Preston’s neck as Thad’s hand seemed to trace the line of his throat.

“I’m here to help you leave,” Thaddeus said. “You’re dying, Pres.”

“Oh, of course,” Preston huffed. “Fantastic.”

“I thought you would be pleased. Weren’t you just complaining about this a few weeks ago?”

“Yes, naturally. But if you speak the truth, then this just goes to prove my point--that is, that my mind is giving me a last little thrill of comfort before I fade into the nothingness beyond this life--and I am consequently going to live my last instants as a complete son of a bitch, cruelly slandering your marriage to sweet, dear Mary Thatch and committing vigorous adultery in my heart.”

“Vigorous, eh?” Thad asked with a wink. “Tell me more. You’d like to go out with a bang, as they say?”

“Filth!” Preston cried. “Filth and malignant perversity.”

“No, nonsense. You’re being dramatic.”

“Too right. And I’m good at it.”

“Hm. So you claim,” Thaddeus sniffed. “In any event, you are indeed dying.”

“Of what?”

“Well, when was the last time you ate?” Thad said, in the voice universal to mother-hens the world over, irrespective of nationality, age, gender, race, and creed.

“Um.”

“I’m not saying you’re starving to death--that’s a little much--but I am saying you’ve had pretty much nothing but Dom Perignon and scotch for three weeks.”

“Not three whole weeks!”

“You have had a sandwich or two.”

“There you are, then,” Preston said, satisfied. “And I thought the crystal--”

“Yes,” Thaddeus said. He reached down and caught hold of the little pendant, examining it thoughtfully. “There is that. I asked King Kashekim about it, and according to him, it will keep you alive much longer than you otherwise would live...enough to really draw attention to yourself.”

“Hm.”

“Unless you die by violence.”

“Of course.”

“And in addition to the whole not-eating, kind-of-inadvertent-suicide thing...I’m pretty sure you want to die, don’t you, Preston?”

Preston sat quietly for a little while. Did he want to die? Did he, hell. Business wasn’t the same as it had been seventy, even sixty years ago, and anyway he’d never loved work as much as he’d been compulsively addicted to it as a means of occupying his mind. The house was as nothing to him, Whitmore pride be damned, and his wealth had ceased to supply him with anything that satisfied him thirty years ago, when the crew of the Atlantis Expedition returned and told him he’d seen the last of the Thatches for the last time. There was no one here to break up his hours; he was the last survivor of the Class of 1866, unmarried, no children, no siblings to provide nieces or nephews.

He had nothing to live for.

And yet.

Well, he was belligerent! Always had been. And he’d fought with all his might to stay alive often enough--if Peruvian jungles, eldritch monsters, lost cities in the desert, proto-Nazis, bizarre European nobles with a taste for blood, the entire nation-state of Malta, dozens of business competitors, the Antarctic Circle, enraged peacocks, vengeful poets, and rioting peasants were insufficient to wrench precious vitality from his grasp, who was he to throw his life away so easily now?

That had always been living, though. And although it was undeniably true that Preston was indeed still alive, he didn’t think anyone would accuse him of living, especially not by comparison.

He took his pendant out of Thaddeus’ fingers and held it. It was warm and glowed against his skin.

“That’s a loaded question, Thad,” Preston said softly.

“Yeah, I know,” Thaddeus allowed. He heaved a sigh and looked Preston up and down.

“I think...perhaps...maybe I am done, after all,” he admitted.

“It was a good life, Preston. I’m sorry that it got to the point that it was something you didn’t want to have anymore.”

“You can only do any one thing for so long,” Preston philosophized. “I suppose that should, by all rights, count in the case of breathing, too.”

Thaddeus gave him a sad smile.

“So how long is it going to take?” Preston asked. “I can move a few appointments around if you think I’ll still be dying into tomorrow afternoon.”

“No reason to inconvenience anyone,” Thaddeus said with a smile. “I can’t imagine we’ll be here for more than a few hours, if you’re ready.”

Preston nodded and got to his feet. “Well, hallucination, I think you’d better come with me.”

“You’re not going to cross the city just to throw yourself at the gates of the cemetery in an attempt to die at my graveside, are you?” Thaddeus asked, sounding rather delighted at the prospect.

“Did I or did I not vow that this would not go in a Dickensian direction, Thaddeus?” Preston demanded. He levered himself up out of the chair and made for the study doors. “Throw myself at your graveside indeed. You think very highly of yourself, sir.”

“Then where?”

Preston led the Thatchian apparition through the winding corridors of the Whitmore mansion. Relatively little had changed since 1914; a few updates to the plumbing and electrical system, and the occasional repaired window consisted in the major additions. Nothing like the wild hooplah of the plumbing-installation days.

The halls were as richly furnished as ever, lofty ceilings arching over lush Persian rugs, paintings and statues from around the world gracing the walls. A suit of armor guarded the master bedroom, and Preston gave it an affectionate tap as he passed it.

Preston closed the bedroom door behind him with a quiet ‘snik.’ Thaddeus wandered around while he undressed and slid into bed, and then took up a seat on the side of the bed and looked down at him with a smile.

“Comfy?” Thad asked.

“I’m a little cold.”

“That’s normal. It comes with the territory,” Thaddeus promised. “There’s just one more thing…”

Yes. Preston swallowed and lifted his pendant up and over his head. Thaddeus took it from him and held onto it.

“Care to join me?” Preston offered, one hand fingering the icon of St. Christina the Astonishing he wore around his neck. That icon and the pendant had been inseparable for more than thirty years. It felt strange to have one and not the other.

“Of course,” Thaddeus smiled, and slipped into bed with him. “Try and relax. It makes it easier if you just fall asleep.”

“If I wake up naked and cold tomorrow, perfectly fine and alive, I’m going to be pretty pissed at you,” Preston said. “Probably go to a head-shrinker over this, and it’ll be all your fault.”

“I won’t let that happen to you,” Thaddeus said, cuddling close and making Preston even colder. It was worth it. “How’s this: if you do seem like you’re going to stir while your heart’s still beating, I’ll beat you with the lamp until you’re a mush.”

“Thanks,” Preston grinned, “I knew I could count on you.”

Cold brushed against his lips again, and again, and again. “Always.”

Thaddeus stayed close as long as Preston could feel, until the darkness of sleep took him and he knew no more.

***

He woke in the morning, lying on his face, pillow damp beneath his cheek, as the light of a cold January morning took its best shot at piercing him in the eye.

Preston groaned and flopped onto his back, blinking blearily up at the canopy above his bed. He looked at his hands. Thin, wrinkled, loose skin covering gnarled knuckles and greenish varicose veins.

Old man’s hands.

Preston scrubbed his hands over his face and heaved a deep sigh.

Hallucination. Damn it! He was going to have to go see a doctor. He didn’t want to. These days they rammed needles behind the eyes of men like him and swizzled their brains about like a waterlogged cocktail. But the only other option was to let himself be tortured every nightfall by the imagined spectre of Thaddeus, Preston’s perverse desires playing out in a manner so disrespectful to Thad’s memory and traitorous to their friendship. That could not be endured.

Preston got himself out of bed and wrapped up in his dressing gown. It was, at least, a beautiful day, and the fire in his bedroom fireplace crackled nicely. At his bedside sat a tray with a plate of Mrs. Critchton’s crepes aux fraises--oh, indulgence beyond reckoning!--and a press full of hot coffee. The worthy housekeeper had even seen fit to leave him thick cream, brown sugar, and a small vial of whiskey of whiskey to allow for a little Irishing up. Preston smiled. He hadn’t had something this good in a while.

Belly full, he contemplated the gilded edge of the plate and the magnificence of his sunlit bedroom. He rolled a thoughtful cigarette and took a sweet, long drag of Virginia tobacco. This was the way to wake up.

And he meant to give this all up, so a quack could feebly try to ram the taste for the sin of philosophers out of his guts? No. He’d keep it a secret and banish Thatch from his head, by hook, or crook, or paranormal exorcist, or more likely early bedtimes and sleeping pills.

Breakfast thus devoured with gusto, he made for his closet and looked upon his wardrobe with a sudden smile. Delightful! The cream suit today, without question. It was his very favorite and he was pleased to see that someone had finally recovered it from its sorry state of shabbiness and restored it to its former brilliancy. The thing must be decades old by now, and to be honest he hadn’t seen it in a goodly while, so he was pleased to see it now.

He threw it on and went to check the state of his beard and remaining hair in his looking glass.

Preston paused, staring. His white hair was not only on his head, but it was streaked through with auburn.

Preston looked at his reflection very, very carefully, and then gave himself such a slap in the face that his eyes watered. His vision refocused and he saw himself as he truly was: bald but for a few white tufts of hair, somewhat shrunken from his youthful stature, tired. He offered a little smirk into the mirror and watched as his white moustache rose in motion with his lips.

Good. Good. Crepes aux fraises, his favorite suit, and just one little psychotic hiccup. He could handle this.

He caught up his cane and made his way into the study. The artefacts in the halls looked right, shipshape and Bristol-fashion, everything as it should be. He glanced at the Caravaggio--yes--and moved on.

In the study, his coelacanths were frolicsome and he watched them with a smile for some moments before shaking a desultory fist at the fireplace portrait and stepping onto the balcony to take the air.

A very unseasonably warm January it was. It brought all the roses out, and he never realized he’d had such roses before. He looked about him at the walls of the house and found that the whole facade had been done up with rose trellises, and clinging to those trellises were yards and yards of brilliant, blooming roses.

Whatever gardener took the initiative on that one was getting a raise. He rather liked the look.

His grounds were lush and green, and further out he could spot Ibil the camel, an old travel companion, peacefully chewing cud in his stall. Good, stolid creature, his honest Ibil. He’d have to take the dear lad a date today.

“Sir,” said the butler, Carlton, from the doorway of the study. “If you will excuse my interruption--”

“Of course, Carlton, always. What can I do for you?” Preston asked, turning from his contemplation of the garden.

“I have a missive for you, sir, requesting your presence at--” Carlton, good, dear, unflappable Carlton, stared at him. “Oh, sir.”

“Yes? Is something the matter, Carlton?” Preston asked, tilting his head.

Carlton looked at him with an expression of concern that Preston had never thought the poker-faced butler could make. Goodness, but the man looked well. Preston hadn’t seen him so young-looking in a very long while.

“It’s just...oh, sir, you’re...you’re so old,” Carlton said at last.

Preston let out a little hysterical bubble of a laugh. “Not so old as you, my man! Why, you were long past fifty when I was a mere lad of five-and-twenty, so I can’t imagine that you can talk to me about age!”

“...even so, sir. You are very old. Wouldn’t you like to try something a little more comfortable?”

“Carlton, I believe you had a message for me,” Preston said impatiently. “And if you will not deliver it, you may be about your business, as I wager I can get along today perfectly well without any more impertinent comments about the state of my skin, thank you! And anyway I daresay it must be nicer than yours, since I’ve not been in the ground lo these almost sixty years--”

Preston stopped himself. Yes. That was right.

Carlton had been dead sixty years.

Mrs. Critchton had been dead more than that.

Ibil the camel had been so much worm food for seven decades!

Preston stared at the apparition in his study with wide eyes. He swallowed and tried to think.

Psychotic break. Oh, no, no, this was bad. This was very bad.

“Mr. Thatch mentioned that you were having some trouble acclimating, sir,” Carlton said hesitantly. “And he asked me to meet you for precisely that purpose. I can see now that he was quite correct.”

Hallucinations in league against him!

Preston walked over to the desk and retrieved the pistol from the drawer. He examined it quickly and checked to see that the bullets were good. He shot at a bare patch of wall and, satisfied with the mark it left, stuck it in his mouth.

“Sir!” Carlton cried.

At that moment, Thaddeus Ermengarde Thatch vaulted over the rail of the rose-racked balcony like particularly confused blonde lemming. He was grinning like a fool and holding a fistful of long-stemmed red roses.

Preston stared at him. Something came over him all of a moment, a flush of heat, a tightening and straightening and strengthening, and he fixed his teeth more firmly around the pistol in retaliation.

“Morning, gentlemen!” Thaddeus blithered. “Ah, Pres, here you are at last, safe and--GET THAT OUT OF YOUR MOUTH!”

Preston pulled the trigger as Thaddeus crossed the room.

The gun went off, but the back of his head did not reduce to a fine red mist, nor even a chunky pulp. Preston pulled the trigger again and then again, but it did not blow out his brains.

Quivering violently, he yanked the pistol out of his mouth and shot at his foot. The gun fired. The bullet entered, pierced his foot--he watched it do so--but it caused no pain as it passed through, and it left no mark.

What. What.

Thaddeus wrenched the gun from his grip and pitched it over the balcony wall with a mighty overhand throw. He turned back to grab Preston and hold his arms so tight they might have broken under his fingers. “You idiot! What was that for?”

“Evidently nothing,” Preston replied, his voice high and tight with terror. “Why...what’s wrong with me? Was that really the gun? Am I even awake? What the hell--”

“The opposite, in fact, sir,” Carlton said, in a voice that had lost its wariness and become as calm and capable as Preston remembered. “You’re dead, Mister Preston. Very newly dead.”

Preston sat himself firmly in his desk chair. Thaddeus let him go.

He looked down at his hands. They were long-fingered and strong, the deep-sunk green veins covered in tight, pale skin. Young man’s hands.

He lurched to his feet, tripped over his cane, and hurried to the looking glass he kept near the fireplace.

A tallish, slender youth he hadn’t seen in years stared back at him, looking just as perplexed and frightened as he felt. Auburn haired and bearded, with straight shoulders and a firm back. Beaky nose, aye, and a jutting chin, to be sure, but magnificent eyebrows and a head full of hair…he ran a hand through it and tugged hard, disbelieving.

He gave himself another good smack, but despite the pain this time the image didn’t change.

“Mr. Thatch stepped over the balcony and the red burst into bloom like a firework, sir,” Carlton said with a rather knowing smile. “If you’ll pardon the comparison.”

In another time, Preston might’ve blushed for his own lack of discretion.

As it was, mostly he just made a fine, sharp wheezing noise.

“Oh, calm down,” Thaddeus sighed. “Really, Preston, this isn’t anything serious. It’s just a matter of life and death.”

Preston whittered out a nervous little laugh at that. “Dead?”

“Yes. I told you you were dying,” Thaddeus said. “I watched you do it. Stayed with you through the whole thing. You did great.”

“A-ah. Thank you. It was nothing.” He darted a look at Carlton. This was all a little intimate to be mentioned in front of one’s phantasmal butler.

Although if that really was Carlton and Carlton’s idea of a good afterlife was serving as the Whitmore family’s butler, they were going to have a very serious talk about using his time wisely. No one should spend eternity as butler, however good they were at it.

“I believe you had a message for me, Carlton?” Preston asked, desperate for another topic of conversation to cling to.

“Yes, sir. Mrs. Whitmore would treasure a reunion with you, if you have the time this morning,” Carlton said.

Preston stared. “Mrs. Whi--Mother?”

“Indeed, sir. She’s been very eager to see you again.”

“Yes!” Preston said, heart leaping towards his throat. “Yes, of course I have time, I--please, I would be delighted to--I should be happy to, if she is--”

Carlton stopped his babbling with an indulgent little smile. “Excellent. I shall relay the message to her and...ah, perhaps allow you gentlemen a few moments...alone.”

Preston covered his eyes with a hand. “Yes, that would be pleasant, Carlton, thank you.”

“Thanks, old man,” Thaddeus said. “I’ll just get Pres used to heaven a little, shall I?”

“Indeed,” Carlton said, and bowed, and disappeared through the study door.

Preston glanced over at Thaddeus and the handful of red roses. “Heaven, you say,” he remarked, leaning against the fireplace mantel and cocking a hip. “Quite a claim, my lad.”

“Heaven, Pres,” Thaddeus confirmed. “Your sins weren’t sins. I told you.”

“Hogswallop.”

“No.”

“Folderol.”

“No.”

“Poppycock.”

“Pres,” Thaddeus said.

“Are those roses?” Preston asked.

“Yup.”

“My roses?”

“Um.”

“Mm-hm.” Preston crossed his arms over his chest.

“Your roses, in the sense of ‘for you,’” Thaddeus amended, grinning winningly.

Preston was won. He held out his hands and Thaddeus came over to him, passing him the bouquet.

“You old fool,” Preston said softly. Roses, goodness gracious.

“Excuse me, young fool.”

“Sentimentalist.”

“Pessimist.”

“Madman.”

“Sodomite.”

“Never that,” Preston said, trying to roll with it, like water off a duck’s back. His smile felt a little unsteady, but perhaps he could learn to make it real.

“Not yet,” Thaddeus purred. “Come on with me. It’ll take Carlton a little while to deliver that message, and in the meantime, I should get to welcome you properly.”

Heaven, hmm?

As Preston saw it, there were two possible options.

The first was that he was asleep, dreaming, and would soon awake in his empty house, his insane mind trapped within his aged body, his Atlantean pendant around his neck, keeping him alive for God-knew what purpose.

The other possibility was that he was indeed dead, and somewhere on earth his body cooled between his sheets, while here, his soul sported and frolicked with the souls of those he had loved. Here, Thaddeus seemed to love him, and his mother, whole and healthy, wanted to see him, and he was young, and there were roses.

Perhaps he slept only for now, or perhaps he slept forever.

Thaddeus’ lips pressed against his, and they were warm and soft and real, and Thaddeus smelled like books and ink and fresh earth and coffee, and Thaddeus held him close, as if he’d never let him go again, and Preston B. Whitmore decided that whether he slept anon or slept eternally, he’d hold onto this dream as long as he could.


End file.
